Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Earlier today I was picking up some items at the discount Aldi supermarket when I had a great, brief conversation with the cashier.

At most, I've seen three employees on duty at the same time at Aldi, and often time's I only see one: The cashier. There's usually only one check-out lane open and a lot of the time there's a line, but it moves fast.

One way they keep the line moving quickly is keeping an empty cart next to the register. The cashier scans the items and places them directly in the cart, unbagged. If a customer has a cart full of items, he loads them in the existing cart and replaces it with the customer's empty cart.

He said they are timed and have to move things quicker than other supermarkets. He also said that a lot of customers don't get why they usually only have one register open and let a line form. He said that waiting in line is the price on pays at Aldi for the lower prices.

Bingo. That's thinking like an economist. I would have liked to talk to him more, but there was another customer behind me and I had to get out of the way.
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Sunday, September 28, 2014

There's a phrase people trot out when they want to justify a big-scale project that attempts to help people. It sounds like this:

If we just help one person, it'll all be worth it.

As an econ nerd, I cringe every time I hear it. That's not because I think helping people is overrated or an unworthy goal. Sometimes this cornball phrase is used for a project that saves people from dying. That's an important thing to do.

That is to say, could the resources that went into this project likely be used for alternative projects? Were those alternative projects likely to get off the ground, and if so, how many people would they have helped, and in what ways?

Some comparisons are hard evaluate. For example, is it more important to prevent five violent rapes or one domestic violence murder? There's no empirical way to make that comparison.

Perhaps some projects that help very few people are worth doing, but ignoring a cost-benefit analysis robs people of a chance to strategically maximize the amount of good they do.
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Friday, September 26, 2014

Freddie deBoer at the Daily Dish has written the most important short essay on the thorny transformation of social liberalism of this year, from the perspective of someone in the trenches.

It's hard not to share the entire thing, but here's the two paragraphs that stab the heart of the matter

I guess what it all comes down to, for me, is that social liberalism was once an alternative that enabled people to pursue whatever types of consensual personal behavior they wanted, and thus was a movement that increased individual freedom and happiness. It was the antidote to Jerry Fallwell telling you that you were going to hell, to Nancy Reagan saying “just say no,” to your conservative parents telling you not to be gay, to Pat Robertson saying don’t have sex, to Tipper Gore telling you that you couldn’t listen to the music you like, to don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, don’t wear those clothes, don’t walk that way, don’t have fun, don’t be yourself. So of course that movement won. It was a positive, joyful, human, freeing alternative to an exhausted, ugly, narrow vision of how human beings should behave.

DeBoer is still a proud supporter of social justice causes and beliefs, but sees the actions of the modern activists as alienating and puritanical.

Suppose you’re a young college student inclined towards liberal or left-wing ideas. And suppose, like a lot of such college students, you enjoy Stephen Colbert and find him a political inspiration. Now imagine that, during the #CancelColbert fiasco, you defended Colbert on Twitter. If your defense was noticed by the people who police that forum, the consequences were likely to be brutal. People would not have said “here, let me talk you through this.” It wouldn’t have been a matter of friendly and inviting disagreement. Instead, as we all saw, it would have been immediate and unequivocal attack. That’s how the loudest voices on Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook act. The culture is one of attack, rather than of education. And the claims, typically, are existential: not “this thing you said is problematic from the standpoint of race,” but rather “you’re a racist.” Not “I think there’s some gender issues going here that you should think about,” but “you’re a misogynist.” Always. I know that there are kinder voices out there in socially liberal circles on social media, but unfortunately, when these cyclical storms get going, those voices are constantly drowned out.

Exactly. There is no complexity or room for growth with modern social justice warriors. One is either completely on their side and uses every pre-approved term and label, or they are a racist, misogynist, homophobe etc.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

A German writer, Patrick Spaet, is convinced that hard work is a fetish and we should be more open to financing the lives of everyone else. In part because modern technology replaces a lot of physical labor and also because rewarding people who work is a mistake. For example, Spaet writes:

This situation is all the more schizophrenic in that we take every opportunity every day to escape toil and work: who voluntarily uses a washboard, if he has a washing machine? Who copies out a text by hand, if he can use a photocopier instead? And who mentally calculates the miserable columns of figures on his tax return, if he has a calculator? We are bone idle, and yet we glorify work.

But his entire premise suffers rests on the fatal assumption that jobs exist to keep people busy, something I have pilloried here for years. No, the point of work is to be productive, and people who are capable of being productive but opt not to are looked down for leeching off the labors of others.

That's not just right wing resentment of people on the social safety net, but also left-wing hatred of rich kids and workers in the finance industry, who they do not see as making any real contribution. These resentments have flaws - there really are people on the social safety net who are unable to work, and finance does have an important role in society that requires long hours of office work - but even with those flaws the resenters have a fair point in principle.

Spaet is right that technology makes people more productive, but his flaw is in thinking that it would be acceptable to compensate for technological advances by reducing labor until productivity breaks even with the past. That would leave several billion people in avoidable poverty so that nose-crinkling anti-capitalists like himself can get more leisure time. It's easy to look down on growth when you're not poor.

People want a higher standard of living, including people who already live comfortably. I can respect someone wanting to work less and live a simpler lifestyle, such as a European household compared to an American one, but that's different from Spaet's sci-fi utopian fantasy where work is entirely optional. We all benefit from productivity, not mindless toil, and the distinction is important.
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The economics are straightforward here: Business owners have to decide if a task will be completed by a worker, a machine or a combination of the two. More robots and machines means fewer jobs for humans, but that is a consequence of technology and progress. We want production to be more efficient, as that brings down costs and frees up people to work in other fields, so in the long term it's good to replace workers with machines. In the short term, it can be bad for individual workers who lose their jobs.

Automating jobs with machines requires capital investments and may naturally be more expensive than hiring humans, but as labor costs go up, it becomes more and more tempting to replace workers with automation. This is bad thing overall, as jobs are automated not because it's efficient but in response to a political constraint. It doesn't save the customer any money by bringing down prices.

See the difference? The first example is beneficial to society overall, but the second one is not.

Modern technology allows us to automate more and more jobs, including ones we thought could never be replaced. Fast food cashier is once one of those jobs, and now those workers should be concerned about being replaced by machines.

Okay, so there will still be people out back making the food, right? Well, not always.

My example at the time was anti-capitalist rhetoric being lobbed at the Human Rights Campaign from the left during its fight for gay marriage, but that same problem is front and center with the ongoing civil war in the atheist and skeptical movements. The two movements have a lot of overlap so I will just refer to them as the "secular movements."

The secular movements have allowed progressive politics to flesh out a lot of their approaches, languages and choices of targets, and in my opinion this has weakened and compromised their missions. It's also set the stage for a civil war launched by social justice advocates.

But, let's be honest here: The flat-out truth is there is something very liberal about the missions of the secular movements. They want to radically change the role religion plays in modern life, and they want science to be held above faith. They also want to dethrone quacks and fools who trick people into believing things that aren't true, even when those quacks and fools have good public reputations.

Conservatives also tend to be more religious, and are very public about their religiosity. Progressives are also on the right side of history on issues like gay marriage, and the major arguments against gay marriage are religious in nature.

Coupled with overt anti-science boasts from conservatives, it makes sense that the secular movements would end up being more progressive and less conservative. However, that doesn't mean every approach and decision from secular activists must be made from a progressive mindset.

One of the greatest virtues the left has is its ability to question authority and tradition. Unfortunately, two of its greatest flaws are failing to question some of its own sacred cows and irrationally rejecting old ideas that have no worthy replacements (capitalism, hygiene, animal testing, chemical fertilizers, etc.).

Notice how much more attention climate change deniers get from the secular movements than denial over the consensus for free trade or against rent control policies, even though all three are major issues of our time marked by a high level of public ignorance, and failure to understand all three leads to poverty and death.

If a pastor or right-wing conservative did it, we’d be calling them out on it immediately. Tyson doesn’t deserve a free pass just because his intentions are pure.

This implies that he believes his secular audience would have more zeal swarming on a right-wing conservative than a left-wing progressive public intellectual for the same act. Isn't that a problem?

At the least, it's a failure to the mission of secular movements that want to defeat ignorance from every corner.

Arnold King proposed in his three axes of politics theory that left-wing progressives tend to view issues on an oppressor-oppressed axis. The civil rights struggle in the 1960's was about whites using their political power to make life harder for blacks. Left-wingers often believe the drug war was created to keep blacks down.

That's not to say this is the wrong way to look at things. Sometimes the oppressor-oppressed axis is the only view that makes sense. I have a hard time seeing the civil right's movement any other way, but as a libertarian I see the drug war along the lines of a different axis, one of freedom and security, with well-meaning but flawed approaches. If you only use one axis for every problem, you will fatally misunderstand some issues.

That perfectly describes the ongoing, frustrating social justice civil war within the secular movements. Young, furious thin-skinned left-wing extremists have been poisoning the secular movement from within and routinely howl like coyotes. Simply put, they see racism, sexism, oppression and rape culture under every tea cup and salad fork, and they stomp and yell every time they think they've found some more.

They aren't willing to accept other explanations, like that there may be something about secularism movements themselves that attracts more men than women, such as telling people to their faces that their deeply-held beliefs are wrong. So, the critics turn to what they know: Oppression! Next comes the purges and the inter-movement cannibalism.All because they limit their thoughts to that single oppressor/oppressed axis.

I'm not saying that atheists need to advocate for low taxes, or let up on fighting for gay rights. There's plenty of right-wing malarkey and anti-science to fight. There just needs to be a little more self-examination when progressive ideas like affirmative action are eagerly swallowed. The attempts to purge Richard Dawkins need to be recognized as a consequence of unquestioned acceptance of a leftward mindset, not of a movement full of bigots.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

One of the criticisms lobbed at old-school journalism is that corrections never get as much attention as the original stories. Well, that rule applies to the blogosphere as well and I want to do my part to give an important update.

I also want to give credit to a college administrator for bucking the trend and making a real contribution to the public discussion of free speech.

Last week a letter to students from U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks drew ire from first amendment circles because it seemed to say that he thought free speech needs to be civil. Well, Dirks read that criticism and issued a second statement to clarify his position.

My message was intended to re-affirm values that have for years been understood as foundational to this campus community. As I also noted in my message, these values can exist in tension with each other, and there are continuing and serious debates about fundamental issues related to them. In invoking my hope that commitments to civility and to freedom of speech can complement each other, I did not mean to suggest any constraint on freedom of speech, nor did I mean to compromise in any way our commitment to academic freedom, as defined both by this campus and the American Association of University Professors.

Monday, September 15, 2014

I was just reading over another generic Huffington Post link defending the claim that drunk sex is a form of rape, and I saw the same tired dodge that comes up whenever this claim is criticized.

Author James R. Marsh, who claims to be a lawyer, was responding to a piece defense attorney Matthew Kaiser wrote in TIME. Kaiser did a pretty good job of summing up why two drunk college students agreeing to have sex with one another should not be assumed to be a case where the male student raped the female student.

I say Marsh claims to be a lawyer because he made a strange criticism of Kaiser that the man provides legal counsel to people accused of crimes. Marsh does not seem to understand the notion of innocence until proven guilty or that the right to an attorney is extended to all people in America accused of crimes, even terrible crimes.

Kaiser, it should be noted, has built part of his career around profiting off of sexual predators. He solicits putative pedophiles and child molesters on his law firm's website... Kaiser sells his ability to protect the "good name" of people who watch, distribute, and produce child pornography. There is no evidence that his college client is different. Indeed, Kaiser never says his client didn't have sex with the victim. He instead makes the baffling claim that the rape (which he acknowledges happened) somehow doesn't count as rape.

I can understand a member of the general public being this clueless on legal philosophy, but not someone who introduces them self as an "internationally recognized lawyer."

But I do take Marsh's word for it that he was "baffled" by what Kaiser wrote. I think he is baffled a lot because he trots out the same tired cliche response that fails to address the criticism of the "consent" standard to separate sex from rape.

Specifically, Kaiser (and me, and manyotherpeople) are saying that it is not rape when two people choose to get intoxicated and then choose to have sex. Kaiser even took the time to clarify:

Of course, if someone has sex with an unconscious woman, that’s sexual assault. And if a woman is drunk and another person forces sex on her because she’s vulnerable because she’s drunk, that’s also rape.

But Marsh, like nearly every other "consent" defender I have witnessed, shot back with an oblivious statement. Early in the statement he acknowledged that Kaiser isn't saying that drunk women are free to be raped, but then later he went on to say just that:

Drinking does not mean someone is "asking" to be raped. Drinking does not make it okay to attack another person (something most men are perfectly capable of not doing).

This is such a tired straw man argument. No one, absolutely no one, is saying that drunk or unconscious people are free to be attacked and raped. He is making a big leap of faith by calling wanted sexual activity enjoyed by a wide-awake person "rape" and describing it as an attack.

I see this exact same argument trotted out again and again when someone is asked to defend their position on consent, and it shows how weak their positions really is when they can't address the real arguments, like the idea that both partners would be considered both rapists and victims by their definition.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

This week I interviewed a young farmer who is in the process of adding a dairy cattle herd to his farm and I had the chance to ask him about his breed choice. I wanted to know why he was picking breeds with lower productivity.

Yet, there were a few families in our 4-H clubs that had other breeds - Ayrshires, Brown Swiss and Jerseys. While Jersey milk has a higher fat content than the other breeds and has its own niche market, I never understood why small farms had brown cow herds instead of black and white. I assumed some of them were part of a family tradition, or the farm already had a sizable brown breeding population from previous generations and the current generation didn't think it was worth switching.

But why do the new first-generation farmers choose these breeds? Jim, the young farmer I met, is getting Ayrshires and Brown Swiss. Why opt for unproductive breeds, it's like choosing the Tiger missiles in Top Gun for the NES?

Jim explained it's really about marketing. The locavores he caters to associate Holsteins with factory farming, and brown cows with wholesomeness. Witnessing these breeds give them emotional comfort when they are making a purchase.

So there you have it. Once again, we see consumers flocking to marketing and packaged images at the expense of productivity. Jim is being rational by appealing to the prejudices of his customers.

Now keep this in mind when evaluating preposterous claims that the world should return to local food production. Holsteins are better at feeding the world than Ayrshires, but local farmers have incentives to choose inferior breeds.

A 2013 article in Hoard's Dairyman attempts to estimate the percentage of America's cattle population by breed. This is difficult because there's no official count, but about half of the cows are registered in the Dairy Heard Improvement program. These records show that the percentage of dairy cows who are Holsteins in America has fallen from 92.55 percent in 1985 to 85.56 percent in 2012.

However, this decline isn't from locavores, as small farms make up a small percentage of the national herd. The analysis concluded that a greater demand for cheese is pushing up the Jersey breed percentage, and well as an increase in mixed breeds. There is indeed a use for brown cows in the modern world, but notice the striking difference between choosing a breed for utility and choosing a breed for marketing.
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Thursday, September 11, 2014

What do you call a district attorney who won't prosecute a crime because he agrees with the political cause of the defendants?

Corrupt.

Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter has dropped criminal charges against a pair of environmentalists who anchored a boat to block a shipment of coal bound for a power plant in Somerset Massachusetts, opting instead to fine them each $2,000 to pay back the Somerset and State police departments.

The two defendants are global warming activists and Sutter is a big supporter of climate change prevention.

“Because of my sympathy with their position, I was in a dilemma,” Sutter said afterward. “I have a duty to go forward to some extent with this case and to follow the applicable case law, but they were looking for a forum to present their very compelling case about climate change.”

Sutter is claiming the "necessity defense," which is normal reserved for immediate threats, and that the fines were sufficient punishment for breaking the law. He said charges weren't dropped, but were reduced to a civil infraction.

What if somebody who is anti-abortion dropped charges against people who stormed an abortion rights center, or prevented people from coming into that center?

Sutter dodged this question by saying the charges weren't dropped, just reduced. He then said the abortion clinic example involves "risk to others" and is therefor different.

He doesn't think people opposed to abortion believe there is a risk to others involved? The hypothetical anti-abortion prosecutor will say people are being directly killed right away. If anything, that's closer to the necessity defense than this case.

It must be great for the police to get some money back for the resources they wasted getting these protesters out of the way, but what about the coal company that was harmed by their actions? Doesn't that company deserve normal legal protections or compensation?

Sam Sutter is unfit for office. He's correct that man-made climate change is a real issue that needs to be addressed somehow, but by inappropriately excusing criminal actions and playing utilitarian games he has failed in his sworn duty to uphold the law.

Al Franken is just one of 49 cosponsors of a senate bill that would reverse the Citizens United ruling. That's 47 Democrats and one crypto-Democrat, Angus King of Maine (Officially an Independent). The basic argument is that corporations and unions should not be able to broadcast ads criticizing candidates for office near an election or primary because those ads function as ipso de facto campaign ads for the benefit of other candidates, and that could be used to circumnavigate campaign donation limits.

Well yes, that much is true, and while people can disagree with the legitimacy of campaign donation limitations, even people who want strict campaign limits have to admit there is something sinister about a law that would make it illegal for a corporation like Nintendo from airing an ad criticizing a candidate who wants to ban all video games, or ban similar ads from the ACLU, NRA or Planned Parenthood.

Franken said the Citizens United ruling is "One of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court." Does he actually mean that, and understand what the ruling was about, or is he just playing to the ignorance of his base?

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Ross Douthat has written an excellent column on the Rotherham rape crisis, where a Pakistani community in England contained about 1,400 rapes because authorities failed to respond to reports.

In a somewhat similar way, what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class. The local bureaucracy was, indeed, too fearful of being labeled “racist,” too unwilling, as a former member of Parliament put it, to “rock the multicultural community boat.” But the rapes also went unpunished because of racially inflected misogyny among police officers, who seemed to think that white girls exploited by immigrant men were “tarts” who deserved roughly what they got.

Well said, Douthat, but he went on to make a point that I think speaks well of the harm and vileness that comes from hyper-aggressive social justice crusaders:

The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.

So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.

Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.

Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity, and your conventional wisdom is what’s most likely to condemn victims to their fate.

Death threats are a cowardly, thuggish tactic employed by crude imbeciles incapable of drafting an intelligent response. They are also, sadly, common online.

So when you see news articles about someone receiving death threats online, its often a good indicator that the writers want you to be more sympathetic to the threat victim or that the threat was made by a member of a group the writer already hates.

Monday, September 1, 2014

There's one very specific person that has made me appreciate Labor Day, and that's my friend Barney with a story from his childhood. I think about it a lot.

Barney, who is now in his 50's, knew a man from the neighborhood who started working an entry-level job at a corner store. Barney and some other kids saw him working there and laughed at him.

Barney caught Hell when his father found out, and his dad told him exactly why: "Never look down on someone for having a job."

That's advice we should all take.

There's a lot of debate over the social safety net, about how much it helps people, how much it discourages work and how many people abuse it. Those ratios are very difficult to prove,and while I have my sympathies for people who are discouraged from working by government policies, I outright I resent the people who purposely abuse the system - whatever percentage they make up.

There's also the lazy rich kids who never have to work and choose not to. Again, that's not all of rich kids, but whatever number of them exist I resent.

So if I'm going to hold that negative view for the abusers and playboys, how could I not hold special appreciation for the people who do work, especially people in the jobs others look down on: The grocery bagger, the busboy, the convenience store clerk, the fast food employee?

I realize Labor Day is supposed to be about the history of unions in America, and that message gets lost in the time off, barbecues and sales that dominate our culture. My aim is not to diminish that but simply say that in a country where some are born into a life of luxury and never work or choose to scrape by and collect from the state, we all owe some gratitude to the people who work hard.
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